


The Chaos and The Calm

by hellokerry



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Falling In Love, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:20:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9425285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellokerry/pseuds/hellokerry
Summary: “How are you?” she asks, feeling a bit silly about it, but wanting to know all the same.“I’m fine,” he replies. Jyn snorts.“You almost died.”“So did you.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title for this, if anyone is curious, is modified from the title of James Bay's album. I got the idea while I was sitting in the dark, slowly dying from listening to the Cassian Andor playlist.
> 
> Also I am not a doctor.

Life begins again. Somehow. Impossibly. They wake up in a world where harsh lighting stings her eyes. Jyn thinks it might be a medbay judging by the pricks and tugs at her skin, but for a moment she is embarrassed to admit that she wonders if she’s waking up in some type of afterlife - heaven, one with the force, or something - and she tries to lift a hand up towards the ceiling, but can’t. She is too weighed down by pain and machines that have her tethered to this earth, tethered to life.

Jyn never expected to wake up again at all.

She wonders dimly in the back of her mind about the others and then she thinks, _Cassian_. She remembers the beach and then remembers his blood that seeped everywhere, that stained her clothes. She isn’t wearing those clothes anymore; she doesn’t know where they went. She doesn’t know where anyone went.

Bodhi comes to visit her at some point and she tries to ask him how long it’s been, but has trouble finding her voice. He looks frayed at the seams, face covered in bruises, and it worries Jyn that he’s the only one she’s seen since she woke up the day before, unable to move, but undeniably _alive_.

“Two weeks,” he tells her eventually. Two weeks between now and Scarif. The thought exhausts her.

Bodhi regards her with kind eyes, but he foregoes sentimentality to gift her with only the facts, which she is immensely grateful for.

A transporter rescued them moments before the Death Star turned Scarif’s gold sky into blinding white. That part she remembers - how she was torn from the safety and comfort of Cassian’s embrace into the safety of a ship. It had rocked violently as the first shockwave hit and they headed up, up, up, faster than she even imagined was possible or safe, and when a second wave hit she had thrown her arm out to brace Cassian, who was lying half dead to her right, but instead found herself careening into the cold, metal wall of the ship. Apparently she had hit her head. That part she did not remember and figures it accounts for the two weeks of darkness, lying in a hospital bed.

Ironically, Bodhi tells her, her wounds from Scarif weren’t that bad; it was the blow to her head in the aftermath that almost killed her.

Well isn’t that some shit.

Bodhi himself had suffered a few major burns to his chest - she can see the angry pink marks peeking out from under his shirt when he angles his head just so - and is bruised in too many places to count. Chirrut and Baze both escaped with relatively minor injuries - a few sprains and blaster burns that grazed only the surface - and only stuck around long enough to make sure the rest of them were okay before being compelled by the Force to seek other shores. Jyn feels a faint sense of loss knowing that they’re gone, but she tries to push it aside. Later, she thinks. When things are less overwhelming.

“I think they’ll be back,” Bodhi tells her hopefully. She can’t decide if he actually believes it.

Jyn’s eleventh hour brain bleed notwithstanding, Cassian definitely suffered the worst injuries of their merry band of outlaws. Bodhi relays his initial prognosis to her and after a few moments Jyn feels as if she wants to fold in on herself, hoping that if she squeezes down hard enough that she’ll disappear. The fall fractured his hip and broke a few ribs, and while the blaster shot ended up being mostly superficial, his ruptured spleen was not. He almost bled out into his stomach on the way back to base and then later his heart stopped. Twice.

Everyone else, Bodhi tells her, is dead.

This doesn’t surprise her, but the rush of news overwhelms her. Jyn feels her chest start to constrict around her heart, the edges of her vision blurring as she begins to sweat. She watches as Bodhi’s eyes go wide and dimly registers him asking if she’s okay, if he should call a nurse, telling her she just needs to breathe.

She wonders if maybe this time, she really is dying.

 

* * *

 

The next time Jyn wakes, Bodhi is gone.

“You were sedated,” a medical droid says matter of factly, tittering above her as it scans her vitals.

Jyn reaches up a hand to rub her face and is surprised to feel bandages wrapped around her head. She hadn’t noticed them before, but maybe she had been too distracted by Bodhi and the horror that Scarif had left in its wake.

Brain bleed, she reminds herself. Her head is pounding.

There’s a whooshing noise as the door to her room slides open and a doctor appears at the foot of her bed.

He looks young, she thinks, but aren’t they all.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, glancing at her chart.

“I’ve been better,” Jyn replies. The sarcasm doesn’t quite convey properly through the rasp in her voice, though, and hearing herself speak just makes Jyn feel tired all over again. She hopes she doesn’t look as pathetic as she sounds, but she doesn’t waste too much effort on it.

The doctor looks up. “That’s true,” he says as he rounds the side of her bed. “Though, you’ve also been worse.” He checks the bandages on her head as if he’s trying to accent the point and Jyn supposes he’s right. The doctor runs his hands over a few spots on her head and Jyn surprises herself by flinching when his fingers probe a particular patch at the back of her skull.

“Hm, still not fully healed,” she hears him mumble to the droid. “Perhaps another round of bacta will do the trick. Make a note of it.”

Jyn watches as the droid floats back and forth in front of her - doing what, she has no idea. The doctor pokes and prods her a few more times, absently making comments to seemingly no one in particular, let alone Jyn. Eventually, he seems satisfied, and straightens his back to regard her again.

“Has anyone explained to you what happened?” he asks.

“Yes,” Jyn replies. “Well, sort of. I hit my head on the flight over.”

“Correct,” he says. “You had what we refer to as a traumatic brain injury, which resulted in a slight tear in the arteries surrounding your brain. Blood seeped into the space between your it and your skull. It was a bit touch and go, but at this point I am confident you will make a full recovery.” A pause, and then, “you are lucky to be alive, Jyn Erso.”

The doctor smiles down at her. Jyn does not smile back.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see other patients. But please listen to the medical droid here, it will give you all the instructions you need and answer any further questions about your condition.”

She watches as the doctor turns to leave, the door whooshing with his departure just as it did before. The medical droid moves swiftly to her side and begins explaining the severity of her condition and the precautions she must take for the next several weeks to ensure her full recovery. It’s voice is hollow, and not soothing at all, and she wonders in the back of her mind where Cassian might be.

 

* * *

 

The next time she wakes, Cassian is sitting in the seat that Bodhi occupied earlier. The room is dark - they’ve dimmed the lights, it must be late - but he’s close enough that she can make out his face even as her tired, injured brain fights to adjust to the lack of light. She groans involuntarily. Cassian shifts sharply.

“Jyn?” His voice sounds stronger than hers did earlier, though she supposes that is just luck. He sounds concerned, too, and more than a little surprised. Jyn pushes down on the mattress with both hands and wriggles her way up as best she can.

“Hi,” she says.

Cassian doesn’t move at first and when he finally does, it is very slowly. She can’t tell if it’s due to his injuries, or if he’s scared he might hurt her. Maybe it’s both. He scoots his chair forward until he is right up against her bed, one arm pressed against the mattress.

“Bodhi said you were finally awake.”

His face looks remarkably untouched, save for the bags under his eyes and stubble that looks as if it’s on the verge of committing itself into a beard. She knows that it’s deceiving, though, she can tell by the way he gingerly wraps an arm around his stomach, the hospital-issued shirt he wears bulging from the bandages wrapped around his midsection.

(Jyn remembers limping towards the beach with her own arm wrapped around Cassian’s back, his weight heavy against her side. Her ankle had been screaming from the pressure, but she didn’t care. Soon it wouldn’t matter. Soon they would be dead.)

“How are you?” she asks, feeling a bit silly about it, but wanting to know all the same.

“I’m fine,” he replies. Jyn snorts.

“You almost died.”

“So did you.”

It isn’t the first time that Jyn has had a brush with death, not by a long shot, but it is the first time in a long while that someone has cared.

Cassian stares at her intently, his fingers running lightly over the spot on his stomach where she imagines it hurts the most. She’s not sure he realizes he’s doing it, just as she hadn’t realized her head was bandaged earlier when talking to Bodhi. Suddenly she feels exhausted, the headache she had since waking fighting to make itself known. She lowers herself back onto the bed and can practically feel Cassian’s trepidation as he leans in towards her.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she responds, eyes closing. “Head hurts.”

She starts to breathe - in, out, in, out - and can feel herself drifting when a rustle of fabric breaks her stupor. She opens her eyes to see Cassian standing now, his face hovering over her. She watches as he reaches out to run the fingers that had previously been holding his side along her cheek. His touch is light. He traces his thumb down towards her chin, outlining the bottom of her lips. He stares at the spot for a moment before darting his eyes up towards hers.

“We’re alive,” he whispers, and it’s so soft and gentle that Jyn almost misses it.

“We’re alive,” she whispers back, closing her eyes.

Cassian keeps his fingers resting against her cheek while Jyn breathes.

In, out, in, out.


	2. Chapter 2

Jyn spends the next few days in and out of consciousness. Her health has improved significantly, but it’s funny how almost dying has a way of wearing the body down. She feels exhausted, to say the least, and spends half of her time sleeping; the other half she spends exerting what’s left of her energy on trying to convince people she _isn’t_ exhausted, which ends up having the adverse effect. It’s a closed loop downward spiral and eventually the medical droid tells her very politely to knock it off.

Mon Mothma comes to visit her once, briefly. She spouts a lot of nonsense about the greater good and Jyn can see why she’s found herself at the head of all this. The thanks is unnecessary and maybe even a little insulting, but Jyn accepts it anyway. There are worse things than being appreciated

Bodhi visits her often. He gives her the news of what’s happening in their war between good and evil, tells her about how the mess food here is better than the Empire’s, but only by degrees, and how he’s taken to haunting the hanger in the mornings to watch the mechanics at work. She can tell he feels a little lost in this strange new place with his mission complete and the Empire behind him. She feels it too, although Jyn has never really had the luxury of stability and so she thinks it weighs less heavy on her, or at least that’s what she tells herself.

It occurs to her that she has a lot more in common with Bodhi than Scarif, shared pasts and all that, or at least shared beginnings. For all intents and purposes, she was once Imperial, too.

“Why did you join?” she asks him one day.

“What? You mean the Empire?”

Jyn nods.

“I didn’t know there was anything else,” he says.

Cassian joined the rebels and Jyn wonders about that too. Both sides at the end of the day were just filled with the young and reckless, clawing their way to dominance, or at least she used to think so during that long stretch of time where she belonged to no one, abandoned on the outskirts and left to fend for herself. She didn’t believe in a cause, she believed in Saw, and when that proved fruitless she vowed to never make that mistake again. Jyn Erso was the only cause she felt passionate about, and she wonders what made the difference for people like Bodhi and Cassian. Sense of belonging, maybe, or purpose - something that has always been so cruelly ripped away from her. It’s been so long since her life held any greater meaning that Jyn’s not even sure she’d recognize it if it blew up in her face.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes she opens her eyes and Cassian is there.

He sits next to her bed and he always looks tired, but through her own haze of not-quite-awake Jyn recognizes a cautious look of expectation. She wants to ask him about, but they have her on a lot of medication these days and it makes her brain fuzzy.

She wonders, dimly, if he chooses night to visit her on purpose. Bodhi always comes mid-day when she’s alert and the medical droids titter around them making comments and everything is moving. But Cassian always visits her while Jyn drifts in and out of consciousness, too medicated half of the time to do much of anything except stare dumbly at him.

He takes her hand on the fourth night, gently in his grasp.

“You’ll be okay,” he whispers.

She smiles before falling back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Cassian runs his palm gently across the top of her head on the seventh night, but by then she’s more aware.

“What are you doing?” she asks, and she’s a little thrown by how groggy she sounds until she remembers that it’s 2 a.m. and not all of them currently have insomnia.

Cassian concentrates on her skull the way he concentrates on a mission brief, reading all the lines of her hair and being careful around the patch where there is none, the place where the doctors had gone in to fix her.

“I’m just… inspecting,” he says.

They removed her bandages the day before. Jyn had worried for a brief moment that as soon as they did, her brains would come tumbling out, but it proved irrational. She was fine. Everything was fine.

Cassian leans over her and Jyn sees an opportunity, reaching her fingers out towards his chest. He jumps a little, eyes darting back down.

“What…?” he starts, but she doesn’t let him finish.

“Just checking,” she says.

Jyn flattens her palm over his heart, and Cassian lets her.

 

* * *

 

On the eighth night, they release him.

Cassian’s been deemed fit for his own quarters, though it will be a long time until any of them are deemed fit for battle and that suits her just fine. Jyn would never admit it, but she’s spent her entire life fighting and it feels nice to be taken care of for once, even if it is by an annoying medical droid.

“You must be excited to sleep in your own bed,” she comments, propped up on her pillows.

Cassian hums. “I suppose so.”

The medical droid floats in to give notice - visiting hours end at 2100. He has to leave.

Jyn wakes abruptly several hours later to an empty room and has trouble falling back asleep.

 

* * *

 

She develops a 105 degree fever. The doctors aren’t really sure what’s going on. They tell her it’s because they’re weaning her off medication, but they pace around more than usual and the medical droid takes her vitals three times before noon. Her head pounds so much it makes her ears ring.

Bodhi tries to bring her desert from the mess hall, but they won’t let him.

She sleeps for two days.

 

* * *

 

“You gave us a scare,” Bodhi says good-naturedly, but there’s an edge to his lightness.

“I’m better now,” Jyn says. She swipes a forkful of his pie.

Cassian leans against the far wall, arms folded, watching them like a hawk.

“Do you want some?” she asks, motioning with her fork.

Cassian shakes his head.

 

* * *

 

They bring in another TBI case late one night. The commotion wakes her.

Jyn watches as they work on the man across the hall through the flurry of doctors and droids and medical detritus flying left and right. She finds out later he was shot in the head while on a scouting mission.

He dies.

(Jyn cries herself to sleep, alone.)

 

* * *

 

“If you don’t let me out of this bed, I’m going to burn the entire base down,” Jyn yells, throwing a piece of rationed bread at the medical droid. From the corner of the room, Cassian laughs.

“Patient has been advised-”

“I don’t care what’s advised! I am leaving this hospital today,” she responds definitively, folding her arms in an attempt to look imposing (an attempt that will be completely lost on the droid, but she’s committed to this show of force and isn’t backing down now).

“She’s much better,” Cassian adds helpfully. “Can’t you tell?”

Jyn shoots him a look, but his eyes look far too bright for her to be truly mad at the teasing. He winks. Jyn turns her attention back to the droid.

“Patient is not yet fully healed and would be leaving against doctor’s orders,” it tells her for the fifteenth time that morning.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she grits through her teeth, doing her best not to actually go through with her earlier threat.

“Patient has been advised-”

“Please,” Jyn interrupts. She had meant for it to sound emphatic, but she mostly comes off sounding desperate and more than a little pathetic. She’s too embarrassed to look at Cassian, but she can hear him exhale in that way he does when he’s concerned (she felt as if he had made that noise a billion times over the past week and it wouldn’t have bothered her nearly as much if it hadn’t come from someone who was also half dead, but each time she brought this up he would remind her that he had been discharged from the hospital a full week and three days before her, and she couldn’t really argue with that). Jyn doesn’t really want anyone’s pity, she just wants to leave this room.

Cassian is eventually able to wrangle a doctor who agrees to let her go under the strict condition that she report for an exam every day - twice if they deem it necessary. She is also given a strict regimen of painkillers, which she accepts readily.

It only occurs to her as she’s walking out the door that she doesn’t know where she’s headed.

“I don’t live here,” she says to Cassian as they walk down the hallway. He turns to look at her quizzically. “I mean, it just occurred to me that I don’t have anywhere to go to.”

Cassian nods in understanding. “They assigned you a room,” he explains. “Don’t worry. I know where it is.”

The bedroom is sparsely furnished and belonged to someone recently killed in action. Cassian knew her, though only in name and not well. He helps Jyn settle in (not that she has much with which to settle), giving her a quick tour of the few amenities, and at the end of it all she finds herself sitting on the cot, running her fingers against the sheets in agitation (a woman slept here once, she thinks, and now she is dead). Cassian stands near the door, hands planted firmly on his hips.

“Now what?” he asks.

Jyn frowns. “I’m not really sure.”

To be honest, she hadn’t really thought much past her crusade to be discharged and finds herself at a loss for what’s next. What does one do, unfit and uncleared for duty on a rebel military base?

“Are you hungry?” Cassian finally asks.

She shrugs. “I could eat.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO FRIENDS. I didn't mean for so much time to elapse between updates and for that, I apologize.
> 
> I understand that my timeline in this fic is sort of wonky, but whatever. Artistic license! And anyway, plot is just a device I use as an excuse to have Cassian and Jyn make eyes at each other. Let's not pretend this is something it isn't.

What they don’t tell you about recovery is that it involves a lot of downtime. A lot of loitering. Cassian spends most of his days getting yelled at for hanging around mission debriefs when he should be resting. Bodhi sticks to the hanger, watching the ships fly in and out and making small talk with the pilots. Jyn wanders aimlessly for hours until her head gets heavy and she feels as if she no longer can stand. She’s trying to increase her stamina, she tells the medical droid, though she thinks if droids were capable of facial expressions, it might frown.

They’re all a little restless, rough around the edges and hiding loss in a way that reminds Jyn of once-wild animals pacing around their cage. She doesn’t want to call it trapped, but that is how it feels some days - trapped by the Alliance and their inaction that morphed into Rogue One’s fatefully unsanctioned mission that turned deadly for so many, but not for them, trapped by their bodies that still need time to heal, and their hard earned loyalty that keeps one eye forever trained on the others’ progress. Cassian and Bodhi wear their burden well enough, used to the structure of the machine as they are, but Jyn has been left to her own devices for so long that she finds the entire thing suffocating. Sometimes she feels as if she dreamt her life outside of Yavin IV’s walls, but then she finds herself standing in a hallway with Cassian, or perusing today’s menu in the mess hall with Bodhi and she thinks, well, okay.

She’s working on a particularly chewy piece of something green in the mess hall, trying her best to blend into the surroundings when the news breaks about Alderaan. The whispers begin and suddenly chairs are scraping against the floor, suddenly people are moving left and right, trying to confirm.

It takes six excruciatingly painful minutes to confirm.

Jyn doesn’t wait around long enough to see Bodhi turn towards her, pale-faced in the harsh florescent light. She doesn’t wait for the scramble of soldiers as they head towards battle stations, anticipating orders that never come. She doesn’t want to see the fear and devastation masked by bravery as they try to make sense of what Jyn herself has experienced firsthand (what she has  _ survived _ ) twice now.

She wonders if this is what the rest of their lives will look like: days of futile nothing punctuated by mass devastation as the Empire picks off each troublesome planet one by one. Where will they run to if there is eventually nowhere left? Rebellions are built on hope, but they are rendered ineffective in the face of such overwhelming odds. Saw brought her up believing in the power of a single person, but the weight of this is beginning to feel insurmountable, and Alderaan is gone.

Alderaan is gone.

Her food doesn’t taste nearly as appetizing coming up as it did going down, Jyn thinks wryly as she leans her head back against the refresher wall. The stone feels cool against her neck and for once she’s glad for it.

Alderaan is gone.  _ Alderaan.  _ A fucking planet, the entire thing just blasted into oblivion. She wouldn’t even be able to comprehend it if she hadn’t been there for Jedha or Scarif. But even so, that destruction had been contained. Specific. Though both planets would die from the aftereffects, it could take years, and the rock would linger still. Alderaan was just gone. Poof.

“Jyn,” she hears eventually, and it’s Cassian speaking through the airlock. There’s worry underneath his measured tone, a nervous tinge, but she can tell he’s trying to hide it. “It’s me.”

How did he even find her?

“It’s Cassian.”

His boots clack impatiently as he paces outside the door. Jyn crams her face into her fists and tries not to think - of her parents, the days spent playing in the shadow of Orson Krennic who later tried to shoot her just as he did her mother, Saw and the bunker, Cassian so very still after falling 30 feet. 

This will be her family legacy, millions upon millions of deaths because her father did not feel he had a choice. Jyn has never had a choice about anything, even when the rebels came crashing into her life on Wobani masquerading their threat in the form of a question. She likes to think if given the choice, she would have made the correct one, though. She would right her father’s legacy and transmit the plans on Scarif. She would change the course of things. She would save lives. Because that’s what she did, after all. Wasn’t it?

And yet.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

“Jyn,” Cassian says again, but she finds she can barely hear him over Alderaan’s silence.

 

* * *

 

“We have to do something,” Bodhi says, and it’s the most worked up she thinks she’s ever seen him. “This… we can’t just do nothing.”

“What can we do?” Cassian responds. He sounds nonchalant, but he hasn’t sat down since she emerged from the refresher. His fingers are pressing into his jacket so hard that the tips are turning white. He keeps sneaking glances at her as if he’s waiting for her to snap and truthfully, she doesn’t blame him. She leans back in her chair and stares up at the ceiling.

“I… we just… there has to be  _ something _ ,” Bodhi responds lamely. Jyn can feel his frustration, the ebb and flow of righteous indignation tempered by the reality of one’s ineffectiveness. She remembers having that feeling once, utterly powerless in the face of the Council’s hesitance.

“The Alliance is working to recover the plans,” Cassian says. She knows he means it to be reassuring, but it makes her so angry to hear him play company boy after all they’ve been through that she physically recoils, jerking her head forward to stare at him in one swift motion. Bodhi startles like a baby deer. Cassian’s face remains impassive, but the corners of his lips tighten ever so slightly. 

“Are they now?” she growls. The accusation spits like venom between them. Cassian narrows his eyes at her and suddenly she sees nothing of the man who was prepared to die with her on Scarif, only the spy who emerged from the shadows in the war room, twisting her father’s existence into her like a knife. The abruptness of the switch alarms her, but Jyn has spent a lifetime learning how to masquerade fear as aggression and she’s too angry ( _ too devastated _ ) to really let it sink in.

“Yes,” he clips, cold and impersonal. “They are.”

“Maybe if they hadn’t lost them in the first place,” she starts, but Cassian interrupts her.

“No one could have predicted this and you know it.”

“So we’re just supposed to sit around and wait for the Rebellion to get their shit together?” 

“That’s not what I’m-”

“We risked our _lives_ because they were too scared to act, and now we’re supposed to just trust them? I didn’t lead all those people to their deaths just to have it mean nothing!”

She knows she hits a nerve, because Cassian’s eyes lose a bit of that calculated smoothness and his voice becomes elevated when he says, “I was there too, you might remember.” Jyn feels a little pang of guilt, but squashes it down. “And those were  _ my  _ men.  _ I  _ recruited them.  _ I  _ convinced them. I’ve fought alongside them since-”

“Since you were six years old, I remember,” Jyn bites, recalling the accusation from Eadu. Nothing in her life has ever felt like a luxury, despite what he said back then, least of all her need to trade idealism for  _ survival _ . If anything, she finds his way of life to be luxurious in comparison, surrounded by danger, but always buffered by those who fight with him and their belief that what they were doing contributed to some greater good. Jyn had that once, briefly, with the Partisans, until it was wrenched from her, and since then her entire life has been about overcoming what felt like an increasingly futile existence. Most of the decisions in her life she has made not because she isn’t ready to die, but simply because she is not ready to die  _ yet. _

Cassian had been cruel to her back then, but in a way that masked the obvious kindness that sat at the center of him. He had been sent to assassinate her father and yet he did not. She’s never asked him why.

“Don’t act like you’re the only one affected by this,” he tells her. 

His anger masks something deeper - regret, maybe. Shame. Cassian has spent his entire life fighting for a cause. Disillusionment does not sit light on his shoulders.

The fight leaves Jyn almost immediately.

“Okay,” she says, tempering her voice. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

Jyn doesn’t sleep that night. She haunts the hanger and watches the skeleton crew patch up X-wings that have just come back from a mission scorched and damaged, but still dutifully in the service of the Alliance. Jyn pretended to be a mechanic once, in another life, and she runs through what little she remembers of diagnostics while she watches the men and women move in and out of the cockpits. Their motions are more sure than hers ever were, but they wear that same hunted look she always has, born of knowing that this is just the calm before the chaos, the realization that it could end at any moment bubbling just below the surface of their consciousness.

At least that is one thing they all have in common.

She senses Cassian approach before she hears him. She wonders if his injuries have made him sloppy, but then a small voice in the back of her head says that maybe he’s just being kind. He takes a seat next to her on the floor where she’s found herself, his legs dangling over the edge of the platform as he surveys the scene below. He leans back on his palms, but doesn’t look at her when he says, “you should be in bed.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Cassian might have been discharged more than a week before her, but that timeline is deceiving. He moves slower than he used to and the doctors insist on checking up on him every few days just to make sure everything is still healing alright. She knows that if he were to lift his shirt right now, she’d see the pink remnants of a scar below his chest.

( _ Your heart stopped twice _ , she wants to say to him, but doesn’t.)

“Jyn,” he starts, but she doesn’t let him finish.

“You don’t need to take care of me, you know.” It comes out sounding angrier than she intended, but maybe that’s just the pain of Alderaan coming back to the surface. Maybe it’s the way he’s been skirting around the edges of her lately, the shadow constantly in her wake. Maybe it’s that she knows he’s worried about her in the same way she’s been worried about him, but it’s been so long since someone has cared for her that Jyn doesn’t know what to do with it and deep down, it frightens her. 

Running from something has always been easier than dealing with the consequences of it.

Cassian makes a frustrated noise at the back of his throat. His eyes dart down towards the center of the hanger where a mechanic stands, gesturing wildly to the underside of one of the X-wings. It’s covered in deep gashes from where blasters made contact. A pilot approaches, bracing himself against the body of the ship with his right hand as he leans down to survey the damage. They look as if they might be arguing, but Jyn can’t really tell. She wonders if Cassian knows them.

Truth be told, she  _ is _ tired, and her brain is starting to get a little fuzzy from the overstimulation, but she’s been having more trouble than usual falling asleep lately. The doctors tell her that’s normal and it’ll pass, but that doesn’t make it any easier. She sighs, closing her eyes, and leans down towards her bent knees to pillow her head in her arms.

“Hey,” she hears Cassian say. His voice sounds gentle even though she can still sense the frustration at the center of it. “You okay?” When she doesn’t answer immediately, he shifts closer to her and the fight dissipates somewhat. “Jyn,” he says softly, placing a hand against her shoulder blade.

When she lifts her head to look at him, the only thing she sees in his eyes is concern, and that both annoys and warms her.

“Okay?” he repeats, searching her face. He’s so close to her. She can see the crows feet that bracket his eyelids, the dark circles underneath, and he looks all at once older and much younger than his disposition suggests. There have been times when she’s looked in the mirror at herself and wondered at how someone so young could have lived so many lifetimes. She’s looking at him now and wondering the same.  _ Cassian _ .

He moves his palm to rest against her face and Jyn snaps back to herself. “Yeah,” she answers, “I’m okay.”

He looks as if he doesn’t believe her. His face is scrunched and his eyes dart across her - looking for what, Jyn doesn’t know, but he lingers on the space beyond her shoulder and she catches the memory before he’s able to completely squash it down.

Jyn thinks about Scarif. She thinks about resting her palm on his chest again and feeling his heartbeat. She thinks about waking up in the hospital, everything cold and impersonal. She had almost died. They had  _ all  _ almost died, Cassian in another room, out of reach. He’s here now, but the Empire is still nipping at their heels, still ready for the chase, the Death Star looming over Alderaan and millions of voices go silent while Jyn herself can only scream. So many people are dead. Her parents. Saw. K-2SO. Melshi who extracted her from Wobani and all those other brave soldiers who foolishly followed her to Scarif. Dead.

This is nothing new in Jyn’s life, but lately it feels as if she’s being buried alive under the weight of all those bodies. So much has happened and she shouldn’t have survived any of it.

“Jyn,” she hears Cassian say distantly. She shakes her head, forces herself to concentrate on the present, on Cassian repeating her name.  _ Jyn _ .

“I’m sorry. About earlier,” she tells him. After a beat, because she can’t help it, she adds, “but Bodhi’s right.”

Cassian’s hand drops from her cheek. She doesn’t give herself time to miss it. She can tell he agrees with her by the tightness in his mouth despite the wry retort that threatens to come tumbling out of it. “We moved heaven and earth to extract those plans and for what, for the Rebellion to just lose them?”

“There’s nothing that can be done,” is what he eventually settles on, but from the gruffness of his delivery she knows what he really means is, “I hate this as much as you do and I don’t know how to fix it yet.” Anger that feels like betrayal shines in his eyes and Jyn chooses not to push it. She knows better than anyone what it’s like to be disappointed by people you trust.

She had once told him that he was no better than a Stormtrooper. She had been wrong then. So very wrong.

They sit in silence for awhile, content to watch the activity below. Jyn must nod off at some point, because she blinks and Cassian is swimming in her vision, his palm idly rubbing up and down her forearm.  
  
“Bed,” he says softly, looking as exhausted as she feels. Jyn doesn’t argue.


	4. Chapter 4

Jyn sleeps through the destruction of the Death Star, shockingly and not. She’s been sleeping a lot recently; The med staff tell her it’s nothing to worry about, but they eye her warily over the top of their clipboards all the same. She’s been ignoring it mostly, but she’s also been staring at the ceiling a lot in all the space that fills up her inbetweens - in between meals, wandering the base, avoiding almost everyone - and it’s beginning to look like her cell in Wobani, the incessant drip drip drip torturing her while Jyn wonders if this will finally be the morning her cellmate kills her.

When she wakes curled uncomfortably in a briefing room chair, something in the world feels shifted.

(She wakes up alone, like so many times before.)

Draven, of all people, is the one to tell her. He stumbles into the room she’s squirreled herself away to, startling them both. His hand stills on the airlock, body halfway into the room and staring at her with as much surprise as she thinks she’ll ever muster from him. He blinks once, eyes wide, before straightening himself out.

“Erso,” he says. Jyn doesn’t respond. The silence stretches out between them like a vast ocean of mistrust. Draven stares her down in that calculating way he had when they first met, when he had nothing but half-truths to base his knowledge of her on. Jyn hadn’t known anything of him then, doesn’t know much now other than he wanted her father dead.

How ironic for it to be him, here, in this moment.

Eventually, Draven clears his throat.

“You’ll perhaps be interested to know that the plans you managed to capture on Scariff were indeed correct,” he tells her. “There _was_ a weakness, after all.”

“The Death Star is destroyed.”

Jyn feels the quickening of her heartbeat, the ebb and flow of time as it stretches out beyond her grasp and she’s untethered, the threads of a life previously lived fraying at her seams. She reaches up to grasp the kyber and it surfaces the last memory of her mother’s face, motionless and pale on the ground. Lyra, her arm outstretched, reaching away from Jyn and out towards Galen. Love and betrayal. The genesis of everything.

Draven retreats back into the hall and Jyn leans back in her chair, willing herself to breathe.

The Death Star is destroyed, he said.

The Death Star is destroyed.

 

* * *

 

She runs into Bodhi first.

“I’m the pilot,” he mumbles, picking at a scab. “I’m the pilot.”

Jyn grasps his shoulders tightly.

“Bodhi,” she says, forcing him to look at her. “Bodhi, listen to me, we have to evacuate. You have to get us a ship.”

“A ship?” he asks, eyes foggy.

“Yes.” She digs her fingers into his skin. “For the three of us. You, me, and Cassian. Can you do that?”

Bodhi hesitates.

“We need a pilot,” Jyn tells him.

That seems to click.

“I’m a pilot,” he responds, reaching up to grasp her hands.

“Yes,” she says. “Now get us a ship.”

 

* * *

 

She finds Cassian in the hallway, alarms blaring, chaos around every corner and time stops, just briefly. He’s looking at her, still as can be, and memories rush forward into Jyn’s view, sharp and real as they ever were. She’s standing on the tower and the man in white is dead, because Cassian - strong, brave, beautiful Cassian - he’s come back from the dead.

She’s never asked him about it, how he fell all those stories and then climbed so many more. Never asked why. He’s come back for her so many times over their brief acquaintance and here he is, yet again, filling up the space between Jyn and everything else.

She watches his adam’s apple bob, his gaze wavering and her name like a broken transmission. “Jyn.” He lifts his hand to hover in the space between them before resting it awkwardly on his stomach. Jyn doesn’t really know what to say. The weight of the moment feels unbearable in a way she wasn’t really prepared for - not that she could have prepared for any of this. She hasn’t been on steady ground since she was ripped from Wobani (since her mother gave birth in a prison). She wishes she knew what Cassian was thinking. She wishes there weren’t so many people around. She wishes her father was here to see his greater good deception come to fruition, that her mother had lived, she wishes.

Jyn takes two deep, heaving breaths. She’s in Cassian’s arms before she even registers that she’s crying.

“It’s done,” she says, her voice straining.

Jyn doesn’t have very many happy memories, but she remembers being enveloped in strong arms as Scariff began to crumble around them, his fingers digging into her shoulder blades, Cassian as the last breath she would ever take into her body and Jyn had been okay with that.

“It’s done,” he echoes.

Cassian burrows his nose into her neck, breathing her in amid the shores of Scariff. Jyn does the same.

 

* * *

 

The evacuation happens and Yavin IV becomes a faraway blip on a forgotten space chart.

Bodhi, true to his word, finds the three of them a ship.

Jyn has spent a lifetime traveling through space and yet she always finds herself restless in the face of such vast nothingness. She’s cold all of the time; She spent the bulk of her teenage years on warm planets, her childhood in climate control, and she’s never managed to get that quite out of her bones.

Cassian is from a cold planet, he reminds her for the umpteenth time as he plops his jacket down onto her shoulders. Still, he rolls down the sleeves of his shirt and Jyn fights the urge to remind him that he didn’t spend much time there. He knows and she isn’t that cruel.

“Thanks,” she says instead, gripping the fur tighter around her neck. “Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

“No,” he tells her, but the way he holds eye contact a bit too long makes Jyn think he’s lying.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” she asks.

“Why aren’t you?”

“Cold.” She shoots him a wry grin, burrowing deeper into his coat. It isn’t entirely a lie, but it isn’t the full truth either. The truth is too complicated for her right now, wrapped up in the culminated remains of post-traumas and so many dead. She thinks that somehow he understands - recovery and all that entails. He was there on Jedha, on Eadu, on Scariff. He was there after. He’s here now.

“How’s Bodhi?” she asks instead.

Bodhi had piloted them like a madman out of Yavin IV. Cassian told him to go anywhere safe and he had obliged, maneuvering their ship onto several lesser traveled lanes before making the final jump.

“He put the ship on autopilot. It’ll be a while before we come out of hyperspace, so he’s going to try and get some sleep. Like a normal person,” he adds.

Jyn laughs. “And what’s your excuse?”

Cassian leans back against the transparisteel of the ship. He looks relaxed, but she doesn’t trust it. He’s worrying the inside of his lip and it makes him look very young. He isn’t much younger than her father had been when he met her mother and it’s strange to think of them in that light, young and idealistic and on the brink of their great love. Strange to think of Cassian in that way, young and on the brink of something. So many yesterdays trying to take the wind out of the sails of tomorrow and yet.

Jyn startles when she feels Cassian’s arm wrap around her shoulders.

“I was worried,” he exhales. “About you.” He doesn’t look at her. Jyn looks at his hand placed firmly on her shoulder.

“Oh,” she responds lamely.

He looks at her then, the intense focus of the briefing room from the day that they met coming back to haunt her. He’s focused on her like he was on that day, but it’s different somehow, all the brittle edges smoothed. He’d made a study of Jyn Erso before she had even known to look, but she’s looking now and wanting the same sort of clarity that shines in his face, to know the ins and outs of Cassian Andor with a feeling beyond certainty - you know me, but I want to know you.

The expanse of time stretches out in front of Jyn and for once she decides to embrace it.


End file.
